LOOKING FOR PROOF

JILL SCHARFF

A psychoanalytic perspective on David Auburn’s play

Proof, David Auburn’s brilliant 2001 play, pulls audiences into a gripping exploration of the overlap between creativity and madness. Auburn presents the complex emotions of a young woman and a family where brilliant accomplishment is bedeviled by depression and deterioration. As the play progresses, the extent of the family dysfunction becomes evident in the splitting of qualities between the young woman and her sister. The one who cares for her father is languishing with no outlet for her mathematical gifts, while the other who does nothing for him is soaring ahead.

Auburn tackles the prickly issue of why relationships among family members deteriorate, yet suggests that these issues can be resolved, given time. The play hinges on two questions: Does a child who inherits her father’s intellectual gift, and cares for him, also inherit his madness; and can anyone believe a woman capable of the same brilliance as a man? The playwright deals seriously and sensitively with complex emotions, including love, sadness, madness, and fear of insanity, and yet offers hope for a brighter future.

As the play opens, we meet the woman on her 25th birthday. Her name is Catherine, often called Katie. After the death of her mother four years earlier, Katie had dropped out of college to take care of her mentally ill father, a brilliant mathematician. We see her in her family home, her lone figure dwarfed by the profusion of books and papers stuffed chaotically into every nook and cranny. She is dressed sloppily and seems unmotivated, lethargic, and irritable. Depression fills the atmosphere.

Seeking some peace on the front deck, she falls asleep over a drink. Her father comes in to awaken her. As they talk,we see that Katie and her father form a domestic couple, a partnership enlivened by their fascination for numbers and dogged by the tendency to instability that they share. Like her father, Katie has mathematical talent, even though she acts as if she doesn’t have it and doesn’t want it, any more than she wants to inherit his mental illness.

In the first of many twists, turns, and surprises, we discover that the conversations allegedly taking place with her father are not real. In fact, he has died recently. Now we wonder if Katie is delusional as well as depressed. Is she hallucinating because she is drunk? Is she talking to voices in her head? Or is she simply grieving, reliving her memories of being with her father by having a conversation with him as if he were still alive?

DELUSION AND REALITY

On the eve of her father’s funeral, Hal, a young professor mentored by her father, enters the scene, waking Katie up, as her father had done earlier. Will he replace her father in her mind and in her affections? Hal extols her father’s proofs, saying that they are “streamlined, no wasted moves,” and not a bit like the mess of notes the father has left behind.When Katie quotes to Hal from the biography of her heroine, a famous mathematician born in 1776, he suddenly kisses her, as if calling her from the 18th century to the modern era.

Every family has its family skeletons, and delving into the tangled relationships that unfold in this play may help us understand our own families. Indeed, it is the emphasis on family relationships that gives this play its power and resonance.

Going through all the father’s notebooks, Hal is looking for a brilliant mathematical proof, but none of the ones he finds make any sense. The father’s great gift has been eroded by mental illness; he had begun to write codes for aliens. Still, Hal persists. Katie becomes suspicious of his intense interest and accuses him of stealing a notebook from her. He denies it. She overreacts and calls the police.We are led to think that she is paranoid after all. Then we find out that Hal has indeed taken a book, not the notebook for which he is searching, but one with an affectionate message Katie’s father wrote to her during a lucid moment. Hal wanted to wrap it and give it to her for her 25th birthday. Katie is touched. She warms to him and gives him the key to a drawer in which another notebook is hidden. He pulls out the notebook and looks at it in awe. Then comes another surprise to end Act 1.

“Where did you find it?” he asks her.

“I didn’t find it, I wrote it!” she replies.

This becomes the central question: Is she brilliant or deluded? Does she imagine this as well? Could this young, untrained woman really have written it? Or is she simply feeding off her father’s legacy?

Katie’s older sister Claire arrives, a chillingly efficient, confident, well-groomed woman. She is doing well as a currency analyst and living with a boyfriend in New York, but she makes normality seem totally unappealing to the audience. She arrives from her home in New York to get everything organized, and it is evident that her capacity for controlling anticipated eventualities is impressive. She has even thought to bring a dress for her sister to wear to the funeral.To our surprise, the dress fits and reveals how beautiful Katie is, and the next surprise is that Katie actually likes looking beautiful in the dress Claire chose for her.

The next act reveals that it is likely that Katie did write the proof, but Claire and Hal don’t believe it possible. Since her handwriting is identical to her father’s, it might have been his proof after all. Hurt by their incredulity, Katie withdraws from meeting the burden of proof, and looks as if she might indeed become mentally ill.

FAMILY DYNAMICS

As we identify with Katie and her struggles, the playwright pulls us to figure out to what degree she is gifted and/or mad, but what makes this play so compelling is the way it draws us in to the life of her family. We can understand how things got to be this way for Katie and we care about what happens to her. She is antisocial, paranoid, and depressed, merged with a sick father, and disconnected from her peer group. She chooses the support of living at home, even though it is a crazy place to be, and she wants to be desperately needed by her father. She is aware of her instability, and lives in fear of experiencing the total mental deterioration she has seen in her father. She is afraid to be like him as a mathematician, in case that will propel her towards instability, and yet she must be equally afraid that if she rejects the identification she will end up like Claire, whom she doesn’t like and whose preoccupation with the domestic matters of ordinary life are boring.

There is a strong presumption that Katie is brilliant, but there is no conclusion about whether she has been mentally ill. She may be depressed by the threat of illness in the family, the strain of caring for an ill father, the earlier loss of her mother, and the grief over her father’s recent death. There are some encouraging signs, however, in that she is beginning to relate to her sister and to Hal. Even though she rejects many of Claire’s attempts at mothering her, Katie is able to accept her offer of a dress in which to feel good about herself at the funeral. She can confront Claire with her angry feelings. When Hal kindly and thoughtfully gives her the loving message that he saved from her father, she is able to cry and express her grief and relief. She can relate to Hal intimately and as the play ends we have some hope that she may be able to sustain a relationship with him.

Claire, in contrast to her sister, is the autonomous child. Proficient in math but not gifted like her father, she has felt less close to him than Katie has, and is less vulnerable to being identified with him. From a position of feeling rejected by him in comparison to Katie, Claire has become rejecting of the family. She moved far away from the family, has her own career, and is engaged to be married. Living independently, she has achieved the same developmental stage as her peers and is connected to reality and to the future. She has used her ordinary mathematical aptitude effectively to earn success in the financial world. Where Katie is symptomatic, she is super-normal. She has paid the bills to support her father and sister and to “keep him out of the nuthouse,” but she has not been there for them emotionally. She feels regret and maybe some guilt that she was not physically present to help her father as her sister was, but she has contributed in the only way she can. She comes across as inquisitive, emotionally cold, brittle, and domineering in contrast to her submissive, sloppy sister.

The character who is missing is their late mother. She has died and left them in this mess. Why did she die? What was their relationship like? How much was Katie’s return home from one semester of university a form of grief, identification with her father’s collapse, or a triumph over her mother, whose place she now fills? What do the daughters feel about their mother? Claire and Katie are so different that this suggests the parents were quite different, too, needing each other to complete the whole. I wonder how much the deceased mother did during her lifetime to support her husband so that his creativity could survive the attacks on it from his thought disorder. If I combine the characters of the daughters, I can imagine their mother as an attractive woman, a bossy, dependable woman who managed everything for her husband and subordinated her life to his career. Perhaps she died furious at the emotional toll taken by her role as the guardian of the genius.

STRUCTURE AND SYMMETRY...

The play is all the more fascinating for its mathematical symmetry, especially regarding the number 4. Act 1 has 4 scenes and it introduces the 4 characters. The sisters are 4 years apart. Act 2 has 4 scenes that deal with the impact of the past and settle the matter: the father did not write the proof.

Then comes scene 5, the final scene in Act 2 that breaks the formula, and makes all the difference. In this final scene, Hal agrees it is a brilliant proof, and his colleagues have verified his opinion. He thinks it is indeed Katie’s proof, because it uses new techniques with which her father could not have been familiar. In short, it is too “hip” to have been written by him. The closing image of the play is of Katie beginning to explain it to Hal. Like her role model, the 18th century mathematician, by having the respect of a man, she takes ownership of herself as a woman and a mathematician.

The lack of a fifth scene in Act 1 suggests the absence of the fifth character, the mother who is missing, hardly referred to, and her contribution to the family dynamic overlooked. In fact, her influence is erased. She has been killed off, perhaps drowned in the avalanche of her husband’s dependency, or by feeling defeated by Katie’s hold on his imagination. In the fifth and final scene in Act 2, Katie recovers the lost mother in her sense of self. To a psychoanalyst, this is a hopeful moment because it connects her father and mother in her mind, and thus provides a more stable internal structure to support her brilliant intellect.

... AND SYMBOLISM

In the play, the notebook containing the proof functions as a symbol saturated with meaning that shifts at different points in the play. It is an object that is transitional between the generations, and between male and female. At times, it is highly valuable and at other times it is devalued. It has various qualities at different times, representing both the focus of the dramatic action and a symbol of the protagonist’s search for a sense of self.

I think of the self as built out of experiences in the family group. Our perceptions and memories of these experiences are retained inside the self as pieces of psychic structure that are called objects. These objects are of infinite variety and they color how we feel about ourselves and our future and how we perceive others. We can see many of them displayed in our relationships. We see them vividly portrayed in this play in interactions between the characters and in the interplay of scenes and flashbacks. In Proof,we also see them especially clearly represented by the literal object of the notebook.

The set is stuffed with notebooks, representing buried objects. Their profusion signifies creativity,manic energy, obsessive hoarding, and disintegration of the mind. Are they worthless, or might there be one book of value among them? From among these many notebooks, one appears precious because it contains her father’s thoughts about his daughter, Catherine. This is a treasure, a precious object of attachment. Hal takes it home to wrap it for Catherine as a birthday surprise. Not knowing this, she nevertheless suspects him of stealing a book from her. She looks for it in his backpack and finds that he does not have a notebook after all. The object of her desire is absent. Then the book falls out of his jacket, an object of guilty possession. Hal reads to her lines her father had written about her in a moment of lucidity expressing his affection and gratitude. Catherine takes the book and weeps.

After making this emotional connection to her father through Hal, and after spending a night with him, Katie impulsively gives Hal the key to the drawer in which he will find a hidden book. She hopes that he will recognize her mathematical talent and help her to find herself in her work and in his appreciation.When Hal misidenti- fies this book as having been written by her father, the notebook becomes an abandoning object, not a statement of self.

Enraged because Hal disputes her authorship of the proof, Katie tries to tear the pages out of the book. Katie and Claire struggle for rights to the book, which Claire also believes to have been written by their father, and the book is thrown to the floor. The notebook is now a rejected object spoiled by sibling rivalry and envy. Claire holds the book herself. Its contents are beyond her grasp, and she hates to feel that way. Now the book is an object of envy.

In a flashback scene, the father gives Katie his notebook with his latest proof in it. She reads it and we all realize, sadly, that it is rubbish.He couldn’t have been the author of the proof in question. Back in the present,Hal brings back the notebook and accepts that Katie is the author of the proof. She takes the notebook appreciatively, opens it, and selects a few pages to explain them to Hal, sitting side by side.

By assuming so many diverse roles, the notebook crystallizes the theme of the distinction between madness and brilliance in a tangible form that gets handed from one character to another. It represents the fatherdaughter connection and estrangement. To Katie, the mathematical concepts in the notebook are familiar, puzzling, and complex, but manageable. To Claire, in contrast, the notebook is threatening, a symbol of her inability to resonate with her father’s brilliance or tolerate his peculiarity.

The notebook and its brilliant contents signify the possibility of valued attachment to the father, which Katie and Claire fight over. The notebook represents Katie’s true self, hidden for years in a mutually dependent relationship and in subordination to her father’s superior intellect. The notebook is the vehicle through which Katie reveals herself to Hal, gains his respect, and re-finds in him the love she felt for her father. Through the sharing of the contents of the notebook, she integrates herself as a mathematician and a woman.

THE END, OR A NEW BEGINNING?

About to join Claire in New York, Katie is scared Claire will put her in a mental hospital, though she does not appear to be certifiable. Yet it seems that she is fated to live with her sister and her husband in their family home and become as dependent on them as her father was on her. As for Claire, it is now “her turn” to look after a family member and protect her against mental illness. The audience is left to hope that Katie will escape this fate, and find independence and happiness in a relationship with Hal. In the play’s final scene, where Hal agrees that it is Katie’s proof and she then explains it to him, we see that there may be some chance for a relationship in which love and talent, and intellect and emotion, can grow side by side.

An important point that Auburn drives home in this play is that there is no proof for the equation of genius and madness. Certainly, psychoanalysis can provide some insight on this question, and on the overall picture of healthy and unhealthy family relationships. Every family has its family skeletons, and delving into the tangled relationships that unfold in this play may help us understand our own families. Indeed, it is the emphasis on family relationships that gives this play its power and resonance. Proof raises the question whether any of us have control or selectivity in our identification with our parents—or our siblings. Mathematics can illuminate, but cannot address the complexity of human experience.

Jill Scharff (CC ’94) is co-director of the International Psychotherapy Institute, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University. She chairs the Cosmos Club Theatre.

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